Computer Science > Networking and Internet Architecture

Title:SOS - Securing Open Skies

Abstract: Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) is the next generation
communication technology selected for allowing commercial and military aircraft
to deliver flight information to both ground base stations and other airplanes.
Today, it is already on-board of 80% of commercial aircraft, and it will become
mandatory by the 2020 in the US and the EU. ADS-B has been designed without any
security consideration --- messages are delivered wirelessly in clear text and
they are not authenticated. In this paper we propose Securing Open Skies (SOS),
a lightweight and standard-compliant framework for securing ADS-B technology
wireless communications. SOS leverages the well-known \muTESLA protocol, and
includes some modifications necessary to deal with the severe bandwidth
constraints of the ADS-B communication technology. In addition, SOS is
resilient against message injection attacks, by recurring to majority voting
techniques applied on central community servers. Overall, SOS emerges as a
lightweight security solution, with a limited bandwidth overhead, that does not
require any modification to the hardware already deployed. Further, SOS is
standard compliant and able to reject active adversaries aiming at disrupting
the correct functioning of the communication system. Finally, comparisons
against state-of-the-art solutions do show the superior quality and viability
of our solution.